The worst protest song ever

A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a jam session with some of the Washington, D.C. area's best conservative folk musicians, including, among others, bluegrass mandolinist Adam Garfinkle (editor of The American Interest), guitarist and singer Lauren Weiner (a very fine writer on the politics of folk music), and banjo player Ron Radosh (the distinguished historian). Just about everyone had either been on the left at one time, or grew up in a strongly left-wing home or culture. (Ron's first banjo teacher was Stalin apologist Pete Seeger.)  We played some of the classic protest numbers of the American folk tradition as well as many of the union anthems that I had learned growing up in coal-mining country in West Virginia.  At one point, just to see if I could get a good debate going, I asked:  "What was the silliest, most mindless protest song of the 1960s?"  I expected that this would be one of those questions on which there would be a wide range of opinions.  But I turned out to be completely wrong about that.  Virtually in unison, they replied "'Universal Soldier' by Buffy Sainte-Marie." (She sings it here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYEsFQ_gt7c.) It's a song I've always liked, and used to perform, but I really couldn't dissent from the consensus. The lyrics are shot through with moral equivalence ("he's fighting for democracy, he's fighting for the Reds") of the most morally dubious kind.

Of course, it would be wonderful if we could, as the song says, "put an end to war" and disband our armies and navies.  But only if military force were never necessary to protect innocent people from being enslaved or slaughtered.  War is always horrible; but sometimes the alternatives are even more horrible. (On this point, I disagree with my pacifist friends, though I do not hold their view in contempt or doubt their moral seriousness, integrity, or willingness to suffer in the face of injustice rather than resort to arms.)  Let us, on this Easter Sunday and always, pray for peace---what Lincoln described in his Second Inaugural Address as "a just and lasting peace." And let us never rush mindlessly into war.  But let us not delude ourselves into supposing that justice never requires resistance to evil doers by military force.  Just-war theory, one of the Catholic tradition's most important contributions to moral and political philosophy and the philosophy of law, will likely never lose its relevance, and so should be tended by Catholic intellectuals and others in every generation.